Search Engine Optimisation is far more than something the IT guys do to your website or a cool phrase, (“Yes of course I’m optimised for SEO, who isn’t these days?”) it is a valuable tool that can help you connect with both media and consumers directly.

It’s vital to have the correct infrastructure in place, such as a Wieck Online Newsroom, but that is only half the equation. The way communications initiatives are delivered also plays a major role in getting your ranking up.

So naturally, as part of your PR strategy you have identified a set of 25-30 keywords for your news releases to ensure they rank highly with the God, Google. Right?

Say you own a coffee shop in Sydney. You might put in coffee, cafe, cappuccino, sydney into the ‘word or phrase’ and you’ll return around 100 results showing you how many people search for those terms globally. You’ll get two or three times that amount if you log in with your Gmail account. Plus, when you log in, you can export the data to Excel. You can drill down into these results and see which ones are popular locally.

This will give you a good guide as to the most frequently searched for terms related to your business and the ones you should be keeping in mind for use in your website copy and headings, press release headlines and copy, and, of course, in social media. Here’s where you should drop these keywords: your Facebook page, Twitter bio, YouTube channel, and blog’s URL. Use those keywords in your blog posts.

Of course, you should include the important keywords for your business, like the name of the business, its owners, product or brand name(s), etc.

To learn more about keywords, check out this 18-minute video by Wordtracker. Take some notes, and be sure to apply your keyword list to your newfound SEO knowledge.